David Denby: The Ten Best Films of 2008

Some six hundred and fifty movies opened in New York this year, a staggering number that will be reduced in upcoming years by an absence of cash in the big hedge funds (not to mention the bank accounts of young filmmakers’ uncles). Many of the year’s crop were small movies, with moments of intensity, a few scenes that quivered into life. In this list, however, I’ve stuck to the mainstream, on the grounds that artists working for a large audience need support, too. Regretfully, I omit “Don’t Mess With the Zohan” and other masterpieces of the bodily-fluids school of cinema.

“Defiance”: An inspirational story, told with a maximum of physical detail and a minimum of rhetoric, about the three Bielski brothers (including Daniel Craig), who kept twelve hundred Jews alive in the forest during the Nazi occupation of Byelorussia.

“Rachel Getting Married”: Excruciating to get into, but, once you become accustomed to Anne Hathaway’s high-wire performance and the jiggling camera style, very rewarding.

“The Class”: a smart, cocky teacher in multi-ethnic Paris takes on a class of turbulent ninth-graders, who then come back at him hard. Essential.

“The Wrestler”: Blood, suffering, and nobility at the lowest rungs of professional wrestling, starring Mickey Rourke.

“Vicky Cristina Barcelona”: Woody Allen’s take on American girls living abroad in complicated Old Europe; sunshiny, art-loving, melancholy.

“Wall-E”: Apocalyptic dismay and social satire mixed into one; Pixar’s most ambitious animated film yet.

“Milk”: Buoyant biopic with Sean Penn’s body- and soul-transforming performance as the gay-rights leader Harvey Milk in seventies San Francisco.

“Trouble The Water”: An African-American woman remains in her New Orleans house during Katrina with a portable video camera; first chaos, and then reassertion of personal will.

“Revolutionary Road”: The ultimate suburban-despair-in-the-fifties movie, from the Richard Yates novel, with Leonardo Di Caprio and Kate Winslet fighting at full tilt.

“I’ve Loved You So Long”: Not a great film, but a great performance from Kristin Scott-Thomas as a woman who has committed a terrible crime and then returns to French bourgeois society.

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